based on experience - in this case his own necessarily arbitrary experience. But what is experience exactly? As Auglund explains it, experience is that which does not require conscious thought but is rather the mere viewing of reality. The consciousness of one's experience, however, in turn creates a vacuum that man, by his very nature, seems compelled to fill. Thus we attempt to give meaning to our experience, to fill the void of simply mindless being. Here the author raises the issue, Is meaning itself an illusion, a bridge over a gap, a gap in the psyche? Auglund's psychic model attempts to encompass both mind and matter, yet, as he puts it, is never completely satisfied that it can say anything meaningful about either.... What Auglund hopes to accomplish in thus constructing his psychic model is to guide consciousness toward that which is greater than it. For in his attempts to come to terms with the problem of meaning, Auglund states that without meaning there cannot be love or kindness or any of the values that Christians like to posit as what underlies Christian life. Faith without meaning, he avows, is not faith but indoctrination.

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